


To Look on Tempests and Not Be Shaken

by spencers-renaissance (tomlinsoul)



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Aaron Works Too Much, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arguing, Canon Divergence, Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Aaron Hotchner, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Insecure Aaron, Intimacy, Introspection, Literature, M/M, Making Compromises, Making Up, Married Aaron Hotchner/Spencer Reid, Married Life, Poetry, Protective Derek, Protective Penelope, Shakespeare, Side Morcia, Talk of the Wedding, They've Both Had Enough, a very fluffy ending, relationship dynamic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:55:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28459377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomlinsoul/pseuds/spencers-renaissance
Summary: In the wake of a blazing row and an empty apartment, Aaron finds Spencer's well-thumbed copy of Shakespeare's sonnets and recalls the morning after their wedding, when Spencer sat on his lap and read Sonnet 116 to him. Suddenly, everything makes sense.or; an angsty, eventually fluffy fight/make up fic centered around Shakespeare's view of true love
Relationships: Aaron Hotchner/Spencer Reid
Comments: 6
Kudos: 84





	To Look on Tempests and Not Be Shaken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DegrassiFanatic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DegrassiFanatic/gifts).



> My initial idea for this fic was scribbled in my ideas folder as: 'Based on 'Sonnet 116' where they have an argument and Hotch picks up a tattered copy of Shakespeare's sonnets, and turns to the bookmarked page and is like !!! so they make up <3.' And yeah. That's a good summary.
> 
> A modern translation of Sonnet 116 is in the Endnotes if you don't feel like untangling 1600s English in the middle of your leisurely fic perusal.
> 
> Also, this is sort of AU in that I’m imagining Haley and Aaron divorced in S1, Spencer and Aaron married in S4, and this takes place in one of the later seasons, maybe 11? But that's pretty irrelevant if you're not super detail/canon oriented, anyway.
> 
> Enjoy!

It wasn’t really either of their faults: work was relentless at the moment and they hadn’t had any real time for one another in weeks. That’s not really a consolation to either Spencer or Aaron, however, when they’re in the middle of a blazing row that has them both drowning in flames of anger and passion, unable to see one another for the smoke filling their apartment. 

“Aaron, this is the fourth case in a row that you’ve stayed at the office past 4 in the morning to wrap up the paperwork,” Spencer shouts, frustration rising in his chest as he tugs at his hair, already feeling far too overwhelmed. Aaron is looking as unbothered and stoic as he always does during their fights, and even though Spencer is fully aware of the emotion that will be stirring under his carefully constructed mask, it doesn’t make it any less exasperating. 

“You know as well as I do that this sort of work load is completely unavoidable,” Aaron says lowly, anger finally audible in his voice. It’s not as satisfying as Spencer had hoped. “We can’t keep rehashing this same old argument. I’m the Unit Chief of a team in one of the most prestigious FBI departments. I have a responsibility.”

“You have a responsibility to me and Jack as well,” Spencer cries, fury bubbling over as he thinks of Jack and just how much he deserves. “We deserve your time just as much as fucking serial killers do.”

Aaron visibly flinches as Spencer swears, an occurrence rare enough to indicate serious emotion. “This is exactly the argument I used to have with Haley, Spencer,” he says harshly. “I refuse to have it with you, too. If you can’t handle it then maybe you should leave, just like she did, hm?”

“Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe that means there’s an element of truth in it then, Aaron?” Spencer asks, voice breaking slightly as the scale tips away from uncontained ire towards hopeless misery. He turns away from his husband, trying in vain to conceal his crumpled face and damp eyes. “And you know I would never do that to you; don’t you dare throw your unresolved issues back in my face.”

“I can’t deal with this right now,” Aaron says, voice and face hardened; Spencer can almost see the walls he’s building up again, the stubborn refusal to concede any point. “You’re not being rational. I’m going to bed.”

His stomach twists with the desperation of the situation as he says quietly to Aaron’s turned, retreating back, “What happened to never going to bed angry?” He doesn’t turn back around. 

★

Aaron waits in bed for Spencer to join him, fully intending to feign sleep the moment he enters the bedroom but nevertheless longing to know he’s safely tucked next to him in bed. When he hears the quiet click of the front door and checks the time to see he’s been waiting for almost 25 minutes, though, a panicked feeling fills his chest. He throws the covers back and treads out to the living room, only to be met with a decidedly empty room. If he was a more spiritual man he’d say he could still feel the angry aura of their previous argument lingering over the furniture. Really what he feels is the inevitable, empty vacuum a home without Spencer in it is bound to house. 

He sits down on the sofa, just on the wrong side of too cold in his threadbare t-shirt and underwear, and buries his head in his hands. The problem is that he knows Spencer’s right. He and Jack both deserve better than this kind of life, of course they do. Jack deserves a father, Spencer deserves a husband. Admitting such a fact, however, requires humility, vulnerability, failure almost. It means telling his boss that he needs reinforcements, that he can’t continue with the 80+ hour weeks, that he’s not as strong as he used to be. 

That sort of thing takes a courage that feels so far out of reach, though, and he’s left defending a place he doesn’t want to be in against people he loves more than anything in the world. 

Forcing himself out of his miserable carousel of thoughts and regrets, he pulls his head from his hands and catches sight of a note on the coffee table, his name scrawled across it in Spencer’s handwriting. Immediately, his heart sinks: it’s unlikely a love letter. It’s far more likely it’s a note of good riddance, an announcement of abandonment. 

Turning it over in his shaking hands, he reads: 

I’ve gone to stay with Derek and Penelope for the night. I will pick up Jack from Jessica’s in the morning, on my way home. I love you. Spencer 

He immediately feels guilt at ever having thought that Spencer would be cruel enough to leave him in the same way he’s been left himself one too many times. His husband has an incredible amount of love filling his heart, and he’s simply incapable of such cruelty. It’s been a fear of his for many years, that Spencer would grow unhappy but be too kind to leave, prioritising Aaron above himself. He knows it’s Haley’s fault for embedding such fear and doubt in his heart all those years ago, but he can’t help but berate himself for ever doubting Spencer. 

It’s not like they’re about to break up. When he considers the situation logically, he knows that. He loves Spencer, Spencer loves him, and ultimately, he’s going to relent. He’s going to draw on whatever shreds of courage remain in his tattered and beaten soul and do whatever it takes to make his family happy, to give them what they deserve. He just has no idea how to cross the gaping chasm that stands in the way of reaching that eventuality. 

He goes to place the note back down on the coffee table, but his eyes land on the book it had originally rested on: Spencer’s well-loved copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He picks it up, sort of absent-mindedly, thumbing the pages the love of his life has read countless times, holding on to the book as an emotional connection to Spencer. It’s travelled their entire relationship with them; he remembers it laying on his spare bedside table back when Spencer visited his apartment in the dead of night, terrified of anyone finding them out. He’d read the poems over and over again, long into the night. Aaron can’t help but smile at the memory of Spencer’s unique quirks. 

Eventually, his absent fiddling lands him on a page Spencer’s visited time and time again. A worn leather bookmark Aaron recognises as one of Diana’s gifts marks the page titled Sonnet 116. Tired and lovelorn, he begins reading.

*Modern Translation in Endnotes*  
Let me not to the marriage of true minds  
Admit impediments. Love is not love  
Which alters when it alteration finds,  
Or bends with the remover to remove.  
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark  
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;  
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,  
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.  
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks  
Within his bending sickle's compass come;  
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,  
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.  
If this be error and upon me prov'd,  
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.  
Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare 

The words come rushing back to him as soon as he reads them: it had been a contender for Spencer’s chosen poem at their wedding. He’d eventually gone with I loved you first by Christina Rosetti, the perfect compliment to his own choice of I love you by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, but on their first morning as a married couple, laid in their warm and comfortable bed, Spencer had pulled out this very book and straddled Aaron’s thighs, reading it to him with an earnest expression. He remembers the air being punched out of his chest as he’d looked up at a bright-eyed 27-year-old Spencer who had been through so much already but still held all the grace and innocence he did on his first day at the BAU.

He doesn’t realise he’s crying until a tear runs down his nose and splashes on the page. What really tips him over the edge is reading Spencer’s small, chicken-scratch annotations around the poem, noting different points in their relationship, events between the two of them that prove the words of an Englishman born 400 years earlier. 

It’s so easy for him to doubt how much Spencer loves him - insecurities and the trauma of his separation from Haley consume him far too often - but he’s holding the tangible, physical proof. This is undeniable, this is the evidence his doubtful, damaged heart yearns for, and the furious, raging, endlessly tumultuous waters inside him settle for the first time in weeks. 

★

The second Aaron’s alarm goes off at 6am, he gets started on the plan he’d formed as soon as the words of Shakespeare’s sonnet had sunk in. The email he’d composed the night before is the first thing his laptop screen displays when he powers it on, and he presses send on the uncompromising, demanding letter he’d addressed to Cruz. Finally feeling good about the entire situation, he turns the coffee maker on and gets dressed; Spencer’s an early riser but he’s determined to get to Derek and Penelope’s before he leaves. 

The relief is freeing, and he feels light for the first time in a long time. He hadn’t quite realised just how much it had all been weighing on him until he’d finally found the courage to cut it free. 

Armed with two coffees and Shakespeare’s sonnets, he heads downstairs to the taxi he’d ordered the night before. The city races past in front of the slow and steady sunrise, dawn marking a new chapter in Aaron’s life that he’s determined to make worth it. Slowly the thick of the city fades into the suburbs, and the taxi slows down as they wind through the maze of identical looking streets until they arrive at Derek and Penelope’s home. 

He pays the taxi driver as quickly as possible and sighs in relief at the sight of Spencer’s car still on the drive as he climbs out of the vehicle, carefully balancing his two coffees, still warm in their thermal mugs. Fully aware that Derek and Penelope are absolutely going to chew him out the minute they lay eyes on him, he hesitantly rings the doorbell. 

“Man, what the hell?” Derek exclaims, clearly exasperated as he swings the door open, revealing a sorry looking Aaron Hotchner standing sheepishly on his doorstep. 

“I know,” Aaron replies immediately, trying to portray as much regret and understanding with his body language as is possible when holding two coffees with your husband’s most prized possession perched precariously under your arm. “I know, I fucked up, and I’m sorry. I need to see Spencer.”

Derek looks thoroughly put out just being in Aaron’s presence, but after a moment or two of hesitation he relents, opening the door wider to let him through. “Alright,” he sighs. “I’ll ask if he’s okay to see you.”

He parks Aaron in the living room and then leaves to go and find Spencer. Only seconds later, he hears the hurried click of kitten heels on the wooden floor and internally cringes; if facing Derek was bad, facing Penelope will be infinitely more painful.

“Aaron Hotchner,” Penelope shouts before she’s even fully entered the living room, “I have never, and I mean never been more disappointed in you. I don’t think you fully appreciate how lucky you are. You may be my boss but that does not mean I will not chew you out when you screw up this bad. Anyone who makes my Spencer cry is in my bad books for at least two weeks. You are in the dog house, you understand me? The dog house.”

She’s thankfully cut off from continuing her rant by Spencer’s shy, hesitant appearance at the doorway. Penelope immediately rushes over and gives him a hug, whispering something in his ear that Aaron doesn’t catch but makes Spencer giggle. She reaches up to ruffle his hair before patting his cheek fondly and casting a furious glare in Aaron’s direction as she vacates the living room. 

“Hi,” Aaron says softly, breaking the silence left in the wake of Storm Penelope. “I bought you a coffee.”

“What are you doing here, Aaron?” Spencer asks, clearly a little confused but still accepting the drink. 

“I know you said that you’d come home this morning but I had to come and get you,” he replies, standing up from his seat on the couch and taking a few steps forward. “Look… your note last night, it was on top of this book. And in my absent-minded cloud of misery I was looking through it and came across Sonnet 116.”

A flicker of recognition lights up Spencer’s eyes as his face softens a little at the sight of his beloved book.

“Do you remember? Climbing into my lap on our one day wedding anniversary and reading it to me? Back then I was partly distracted by the gorgeous man in my arms but last night… Spencer, the words hit home in a way I haven’t felt before. Not to mention your annotations; I felt like I was reading a journal of our love story, which I know was probably your intention all along.” He shakes his head, trying to get back on track. “I’ve been an idiot, a rotten fool, and I’m so sorry. I emailed Cruz this morning.”

“You did?” Spencer looks up, surprise filling his features for a second before a small, hopeful smile takes over. “What did you say?”

“That I couldn’t continue with the workload and I needed reinforcements. That I would work the same hours for two more weeks to allow them to find an adequate solution, but after that I’ll be reducing my hours to align almost directly with yours,” he says, tentatively gauging Spencer’s reaction. 

It’s made pretty easy for him when Spencer’s hesitantly hopeful smile blossoms into a wide grin, relaxing his posture as relief overtakes his body and he throws himself into Aaron’s arms. Aaron buries his face into his husband’s curls and lets himself breathe easy, feeling infinitely better with Spencer wrapped up in his arms again, just where he belongs. 

“I’m so sorry, baby,” Aaron whispers as he pulls Spencer impossibly closer. 

“I’m sorry, too,” Spencer sighs, nestling his face further into Aaron’s neck. “We both said things we shouldn’t have. But, you’re here now, and that’s what counts.”

“I love you, you know that?” Aaron murmurs, pulling away slightly so he can look Spencer in the eyes, trying to convey his sincerity as well as possible. 

“I know,” he smiles. “I love you, too.”

“Come on, sweetheart,” Aaron says, patting Spencer’s side gently. “Let’s get out of here before Penelope comes to stab me with her high heels.”

Spencer giggles at that. “I don’t know, maybe, I’d like to see that,” he teases, digging his finger into Aaron’s ribs for good measure. 

“Oh, stop it you,” Aaron smiles fondly before kissing the top of Spencer’s head, feeling happier in this moment than he’d ever thought possible again last night. Peace is finally restored in Aaron Hotchner’s heart, all thanks to one rather ancient English playwright and an academic for a husband. “Let’s go and get Jack,” he says, longing to have his whole family back together, to restore the equilibrium of a tumultuous few weeks. 

Spencer leans down to kiss his shoulder as they walk out of the Morgan-Garcia house, and it’s enough to keep him warm the whole way home.

**Author's Note:**

> The Modern Translation, as promised: 
> 
> I will not admit that interferences are possible in the union of two people  
> In love. Love that changes  
> when circumstances do is not love,  
> Nor if it bends when someone tries to destroy it:  
> Oh no! It is an eternally fixed point,  
> Which may watch storms but is never shaken by them;  
> it is the guiding star for ever lost ship:  
> Its distance may be measured but its quality cannot be.  
> Love does not fall victim to Time, though features of youth  
> Are eventually entrapped by him;  
> Love doesn’t change as hours and weeks race past,  
> But endures until death.  
> If this is wrong, and I’m proved incorrect,  
> Then I never wrote, and no man ever loved. 
> 
> The other poems mentioned in this fic are some of my absolute favourites: [I Love You](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50334/i-love-you-56d22d5628559) by Ella Wheeler Wilcox and [I Loved You First](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50507/i-loved-you-first-but-afterwards-your-love) by Christina Rosetti, so give those a read!  
> Kudos and comments are always appreciated and make me very happy, but honestly just so glad you're here!
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this angsty/fluffy little fic, and that your January is going well. Sending you all so much love <3
> 
> This is the [rebloggable post](https://spencers-renaissance.tumblr.com/post/640584199338901504/to-look-on-tempests-and-not-be-shaken), and here is my [tumblr](https://spencers-renaissance.tumblr.com) if that's your jam :))


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